79 Years Of Radcliff Line: Story Of How India And Pakistan Were Divided

As India prepares to celebrate its 79th Independence Day this year, people wonder what transpired in 1947 and led to the partition of this nation. Central to that year and the division was the Radcliffe Boundary Commission's work.

Its hastily drawn lines redrew history, caused the division of India and left behind a legacy of conflict that still echoes along the Indo-Pakistan border.

By the time the Mountbatten Partition Plan was announced on June 3, 1947, the British withdrawal from the subcontinent was already accelerated. The job of dividing India and Pakistan was largely left to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a barrister from London who had never visited South Asia before being designated the task. With only five weeks to work, he was requested to head two commissions. One was for Punjab and one for Bengal. These commissions would decide where the Radcliffe Line, the new border, would be drawn.

The task was staggering. The 1947 Boundary Commission had to divide provinces predominantly along religious lines based on out-of-date and misleading census reports. Punjab and Bengal had mixed populations with families of various religions coexisting. Radcliffe had no time and paid attention primarily to the majority groups. He disregarded the social and economic relations that bound these regions.

The resultant Radcliffe Line, completed in August 1947, made both India and Pakistan unhappy. It divided Sikh populations in Punjab and awarded the Muslim-dominant district of Gurdaspur to India, displeasing Pakistan. Strangely enough, the partition plan was not made public until two days after India's independence and three days after Pakistan's independence.

The aftershock in the days and months that followed was catastrophic. Trains full of refugees rumbled across the Radcliffe Line, arriving with most passengers dead. Estimates of the dead varied from two lakh to two million. Millions of others were displaced in what was the biggest migration of the 20th century.

One of the biggest and longest conflicts spawned by this process was that over Jammu and Kashmir. The princely state was Muslim-majority but stayed independent until tribesmen from Pakistan invaded the territory and its Hindu ruler acceded to India. This sparked the first war between India and Pakistan and solidified Kashmir as the most unstable flashpoint of their relationship.

Seventy-nine years later, the India-Pakistan partition remains a case study of the consequences of hasty decisions and disregarding ground realities. Though Sir Cyril Radcliffe left shortly after he had submitted his maps, those living along that line have endured its cost ever since.